IRS, SSA to let public try digital signatures

The government will use electronic tax filing and on-line Social Security benefits reviews as the first public tests of a public-key infrastructure for the Digital Signature Standard.

Starting in February, the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration will let about 1,000 citizens in San Jose, Calif., and Dayton, Ohio, file income taxes and check the status of SSA benefits using home PCs, federal kiosks and the Internet.

Eventually the pilot will be expanded to let the Education Department process student aid and grant applications electronically.

Officials in the General Services Administration's Security Infrastructure Program Management Office (SI-PMO) are coordinating the interagency PKI pilot.

Some internal government PKI prototypes are under development already, including efforts led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Defense Department. But SI-PMO officials said this is the first pilot that meets the National Performance Review's mandate for establishing public digital signature programs based on the government's Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA).

"We've been asked to put a mechanism in place for secure functionality in the National Information Infrastructure," said Richard Kemp, SI-PMO's acting director. "We're putting together a system where you can identify yourself and go into the government and collect data on the Internet."

"We're deploying crypto-enabled transactions to exchange protected information between agencies and citizens," said Phil Mellinger, SI-PMO's chief engineer. "The purpose is to revolutionize citizen-agency transactions."

SI-PMO officials unveiled plans for what they called the Paperless Federal Transactions for Citizens pilot during a public meeting this month at GSA's headquarters in Washington.

Digital signatures are considered an essential ingredient in the government's plans for electronic commerce and other on-line government services. DSS is based on public-key cryptography techniques, and it uses the DSA developed by NIST to produce user-unique signatures.

Under the pilot plan, citizens will use smart tokens to generate their public and private key parts. Users then will present the Postal Service with their signed public keys and other personal identification.